Learnings from Smart Homes for Smart Cities

We live in a digital world, with smart connections and services expanding their outreach every day. Smart homes have already become a thing of the present, with their number also expected to surpass the 300 million mark by 2023. Smart homes use connected devices and appliances to perform actions, tasks, and automated routines to save money, time, and energy. And since their existence, all the knowledge gathered around them offers a strong base of learnings that can help us better understand the challenges behind creating and expanding smart cities. 

Let’s consider the principles of smart homes as a good testing ground for smart cities, on a grander scale. The smart tech used for homes is meant to achieve a number of functions that simplify and make life more efficient, from the use of energy that adapts to someone’s presence in the room, to more dynamic routines such as the use of a toaster that turns itself on while you get in the shower, to the more widely used cleaning robot. AI services easily create a dynamic home ecosystem that aims to give daily life a sense of ease and interconnectivity.

A lot of these principles stand at the base of how smart cities can improve and what obstacles need to be taken into account along the way. The wonder of the Internet of Things (IoT) is that, at least in principle, it makes life simpler and better, but on the other hand, it creates a dependency that can face a series of problems at a city scale.

The first issue inevitably looks at the threat of malicious attacks as a result of weak device security, and this is down to some of the tech used in the implementation of smart city infrastructures not having the necessary anti-malware protection - making the networks they operate in highly vulnerable. On the other hand, many manufacturers choose to route their connectivity through the Cloud, which is also exposed to potential failings, as was the case of recent Google and Amazon outages which made each brand’s smart home devices stop working.

It is expected to face incidents along with innovation, but when we’re referring to smart cities, these can be dangerous without the right backup plan. Smart city strategies take into account urbanization, energy distribution, health, safety and sustainability, and each of these areas need to be protected in two key aspects: the threat of cyberattacks and cloud fallback solutions. These are challenges that major tech companies in the smart home market have already faced. Reliable solutions, such as network-level security, are a must. But cyber-security firms also need to cooperate with internet providers and OEMs to ensure the online safety of every connected device in the scheme.

These key learnings from smart homes (and their challenges) can teach us to create contingency plans and strategies that apply at a city level, along with security-proofed solutions that must be taken into account from the initial, planning phase. Having a back-up and fallback plan is essential for the protection of citizens and their data, and without them on board, you’re one step closer to easily losing their trust.